by Meg O'Brien
Around one o’clock, I pulled out the fried-egg sandwich I’d brought from breakfast and wolfed it down like there was no tomorrow. Afterward, my stomach growled, and I longed for a bathroom. I might be getting kind of good as a private investigator, but I’d honestly never thought how a female P.I. took care of her bodily needs while on a stake-out. Men, they’ve got bottles, but a woman would need a Costco-size mayonnaise jar, and even at that, she might end up impaling herself on the steering wheel.
I didn’t have to wait much longer, however. A cab pulled up beside the house, on a street that ran at a forty-five-degree angle to the one in front. It stopped halfway down that street, and Lindy stepped out. At least, I thought it was Lindy. This time she wore a black suit and a hat with a black veil, à la Joan Crawford or Bette Davis. Geez. I’d have to have a talk with this woman. Clearly, she’d been watching too many black-and-white forties’ movies.
She didn’t come around the corner to the front door, but went through a side gate in a brick fence that I assumed led into a garden behind the house. I couldn’t see her after that, but the cab had driven off, so I knew she’d be longer than just a few minutes. I waited another five, then went through the same side gate. It did lead into a garden, one that was immaculate and beautifully laid out. There were several wind chimes and fountains, and one corner was decorated with a sort of pageant of garden gnomes. I could just see Lindy setting them out there in a whimsical moment during better days.
In the center of the lawn was the largest fountain, with a statue of an angel holding a baby. I wondered if Lindy had put it there in the months before she had her child. There was no water running through it and now I noticed that weeds were growing up against its foundation. It looked sad and neglected, unlike the rest of the garden.
I went up to the back door and knocked softly. No answer, so I knocked a bit louder. After a few moments I heard footsteps approaching the door. Someone pulled the lace curtain aside and peered out. She had short, curly brown hair that was graying, and her cheeks were rosy. She studied me through Ben Franklin-type glasses that perched on the end of her nose, and I couldn’t help thinking that she looked for all the world like Mrs. Santa Claus.
Just in case she wasn’t, though, I decided to be firm and tell her I was here to see Lindy and she’d have to let me in, or I’d get the police.
This wasn’t necessary, however. The woman surprised me by opening the door quickly and pulling me in. She wore a conservative but nicely tailored green uniform, with the name Irene embroidered on the lapel. This was the nanny, then. Irene. The one who had told Lindy she would let her in once a week to see Jade, when Roger was gone.
I wondered where the sexy blond maid was, the one who’d been at the front door the day before.
“Mrs. Van Court saw you come into the garden,” Irene said. “She’s asked that you wait in the parlor until she comes down.”
“Is Roger here?” I asked as I trotted behind her along a hallway.
“No. Mr. Van Court is running late today.”
“What time does he usually get home?” I asked, looking at my watch.
“It varies.”
She didn’t meet my eyes, and despite her appearance, she didn’t seem particularly friendly. Clearly, Nanny Irene didn’t like the position she was being placed in. Not that I blamed her, if she could wind up being fired for letting Lindy see her baby.
But could Lindy really trust her? I wasn’t so sure.
Irene motioned for me to follow her into a huge foyer that had stairs curving up on both sides to the second floor, meeting a balcony that spanned the entire width of the upstairs hall.
The usual family portraits, one of which I recognized as Roger’s father, graced the walls. By their clothes, it looked as if the others were ancestors going back at least five centuries. Oddly, there were no women. No mothers, no grandmothers, no sisters or aunts. Women didn’t seem terribly revered in this house.
The nanny was waiting for me by a door that led into a formal parlor. I entered the room after her and took a seat on a stiff Victorian chair. The rest of the furniture was just as staid, and the marble fireplace was ornately covered with gold lion heads.
I couldn’t for the world see the old Lindy Lou Trent decorating her home this way. In fact, it didn’t seem as if her personality had made a dent on this place. I wondered how long she had actually lived here, and asked the nanny as much.
“Since about the time I came here,” she said.
“And how long ago was that?” I asked.
“I came to help Miss Lindy when—” She broke off then, as if she’d said too much for an employee who wasn’t supposed to talk about family matters.
I sat in an awkward silence for another five minutes or so while the nanny stood by the door, fidgeting and twisting her hands nervously. Finally I heard the faint tip-tapping of a woman’s heels on the stairs in the hallway.
“That’ll be Miss Lindy,” Irene said. “I’ll go now.”
I smiled and thanked her for her trouble.
If Lindy’s personality hadn’t made a dent on this house, it had certainly had its effect on her. She swished in, looking for all the world like the mistress of this overdone house. Dressed like a society matron in a dove-gray designer suit, she wore matching stockings and shoes. Her hair was pinned up in a smooth twist, and between this Lindy and the one I’d seen in L.A., there was little resemblance.
“You shouldn’t be here, Mary Beth,” were the first words out of her mouth. She sounded angry.
“It looks like you shouldn’t be, either,” I said, gesturing to our surroundings. “What the hell is going on, Lindy? And why are you dressed like Mrs. de Winter coming back to Manderley again?”
“I had to change into something clean,” she said defensively, “and I took this opportunity to get some clothes from my closet. These are the only kinds of clothes I have here.”
“Well, I hope you’re not planning to go back on the streets dressed like that. You’ll get mugged.”
“That’s none of your business! And you had no right to come here. You have to go.”
“Not until I find out why you skipped out on me the other night,” I said. “I want to know what you’re up to. And by the way, so do the cops.”
“I was coming back,” she said angrily. “I had every intention of coming back. I just had to see my baby.” Tears welled in her eyes, and her mouth shook.
“Have you seen her?” I asked. “Is that what you were doing upstairs?”
“Dammit, Mary Beth! This is all I have, these few minutes once a week. I don’t want to spend them defending myself to you!”
“Lindy,” I said quietly, “I just asked if you had seen your baby.”
“Of course I have!” she snapped. “What is it that you don’t understand, Mary Beth?”
“I guess I don’t understand why you’re so upset to see me here.”
“I just told you. I need all the time I can get with my child. When I want to see you, for God’s sake, I can see you in L.A.!”
“Sure you can,” I said. “Just knock on my door, any hour, any night.”
She flushed. “I’m sorry. I know I asked a lot of you. But, Mary Beth, Roger could come home any minute. I have to finish my visit and get out. So I’m begging you. Will you please leave? I promise I’ll come back to L.A. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
“Lindy,” I said softly, in case anyone was listening outside the door, “what about our plan? We were going to get Jade out of here. I’m here now. Let’s do it.”
“No! No, I can’t do it right now. Look, it’s got to wait.”
“For how long?”
“I’m not sure. A few days, maybe.”
“Lindy…what’s changed? Why are you backing out of this?”
“I—I’m not backing out, not really. I just need a few more days.” Her gaze flicked over to the front windows. “Please, Mary Beth, you’ve got to go.”
There wasn’t anything I could do to force h
er to come with me, or to force her to bring Jade with us. To me, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. We could be out of here in five minutes at the most. How difficult could it be?
Instinctively, I wanted to race upstairs, grab Lindy’s baby and run with her—even if Lindy refused to come, too. Some gut instinct told me there was something terribly wrong here, something Lindy hadn’t told me about.
I could just see jolly old Roger bringing charges against me for kidnapping, though. And if Lindy for some reason refused to testify against him, I wouldn’t stand a chance.
There had to be some other way to help Jade.
I wrote the number of my hotel on the back of a business card and handed it to her. “I’ll be staying in San Francisco tonight. Call me if you need me, okay? I’ll be flying home in the morning, so you can reach me down there, either at my house or the office. Just call me. I’m worried about you, Lindy.”
She grabbed the card and quickly shoved it into a pocket in her dress. “I will, I promise. Now go, Mary Beth. Go out the back, just like you came in. I’ll have Irene show you out.”
As we crossed the hall, she called up the stairs, “Irene? Can you come down here, please, and show my visitor out?”
“It’s okay, I can find my way,” I said.
“No, let Irene walk with you.”
“Lindy, don’t be silly. I can remember my way to the back door.”
But Irene was hurrying down the stairs, and Lindy almost pushed me at her. The nanny took my arm and issued me out the back door. In old-time detective novels, when someone was being got rid of so obviously, it was called the bum’s rush.
Hmm. Lindy was giving me the bum’s rush. And I hadn’t a clue as to why.
I drove along the Embarcadero and stopped at the Fog City Diner on my way back to the hotel. The garlic potatoes and pot roast called to me like a siren song, just as tempting as when I’d had them a couple of years ago up here. Still, I planned to work out before calling it a night, and I didn’t want to feel heavy. I ordered a chicken salad with avocado, pepitas and lime, and a cup of coffee. While I waited for the meal, I took a pad and pen from my purse and started to make notes.
First of all, what did I know about Lindy, and why she had come to L.A.?
She had told me that Roger had thrown her out. She’d been on the streets for three weeks, she said. Then she ran into someone in an L.A. bar who gave her my address.
I still found it hard to believe that she “just happened” to meet someone in a bar, who “just happened” to know where I lived.
But if that were true, who could it have been? I had been spooked the day I moved out of the little adobe duplex in Hollywood, and I had insisted no one know where I was moving. My mail went to my office, and I’d told Nia never to give out my address or phone number at Malibu. She’d sensed that something bad had happened, so I finally told her the whole miserable story about how the woman I’d hired to clean my house in Hollywood, after I moved out, had found a camera in the heater vent of my bathroom ceiling.
I had just seen a show on television about landlords spying on tenants, and I was horrified and embarrassed to think that my landlord—an unmitigated scuzz-ball—must have seen every single thing I’d done in that bathroom. I even worried that he’d put pictures of me on the Internet, the way men like that sometimes do.
I called the police immediately and they came out and dismantled the camera, saying that it looked as if it had been there for years. I felt violated, as if everyone could see through me. Especially the cops, who I overheard snickering in the bathroom.
They did their job, though. They talked to my landlord, and the next thing I knew he’d been arrested. He kicked and screamed and swore he was innocent, while the D.A. said she was just as sure he wasn’t. He was a registered sex offender, she told me, but unfortunately, she didn’t have proof that he’d put the camera in my bathroom. They’d found no tapes in his house, or any fingerprints on the camera, which, even though it was dusty, had at some time been wiped clean.
I was almost relieved that the case wouldn’t go to trial, as I didn’t want to end up as a story on 20/20, where everyone I knew could learn about my humiliation. And since I was moving out anyway, it no longer mattered.
For weeks after, though, I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, afraid, even in my new home, to go into the bathroom. I got up on a step stool several times a week and took the vent cover down to see if there was a camera behind it—though who would have done that, I can’t say, since I no longer had a landlord. It was out-and-out paranoia, yet it took me a year or so to get over it.
So who could have given Lindy my address in Malibu? My oldest friends were Martina and Deb, who still lived in Hollywood where I’d met them in the old days. We hadn’t been in touch for a while, however. We made it a priority to meet once a year at a restaurant for lunch, but as my business grew it seemed we had less and less in common. Martina was a waitress at a place where I’d worked years ago, and Deb had gotten married, given birth to four kids, and was now a single mom. I found their conversation about hairdos, men and dating to be much more interesting than my own contributions, but not interesting enough to make me want to pursue more frequent get-togethers.
Had I given either one of them my new address at the beach house? I was sure I hadn’t.
Besides, what kind of freaking coincidence would it be for either of them to have run into Lindy—another old friend I hadn’t seen in ages—in a city of ten million?
No, it was too much of a stretch. I should have pressed Lindy for more information the night she showed up at my door. I would have, too, if she hadn’t fallen asleep on my bed.
Now I wondered if that had been deliberate—a way to get out of talking to me further, of being nagged into telling the truth.
I barely noticed when my coffee arrived. Certain things had been bothering me since seeing Lindy at her house. Her anger, most of all. I knew she was surprised to see me there, but why the anger? And why had the nanny kept so close an eye on me while I was there? Even escorting me, her hand firmly on my arm, out the door?
My salad came and I wolfed it down with a few bites of a buttery garlic, leek and basil loaf that was so tempting I had to ask the waitress to take it away. When I finished eating, she wanted to know if I’d like dessert. “The bread pudding with rum caramel is especially good tonight,” she said.
I groaned, paid my check and got myself out the door in a matter of seconds, before whatever will-power I had left, left me.
My list had ended with a row of question marks. I just didn’t have enough information to figure everything out, though I was beginning to have certain suspicions. In the hotel, I dropped off my purse and coat in my room and took the elevator to the gym. At the locker that had been assigned to me for as long as I stayed, I changed into sweats and pulled my hair back with an elastic band. Looking at myself in a full-length mirror, I sucked my stomach in. Despite my decision to eat light, there was a little bit of a pouf I didn’t like. Well, they say that after thirty it gets harder and harder to keep it off. Thank God my muscles were still strong.
I frowned into the mirror and was just shutting my locker, when the lights went out. Stumbling against a bench between the row of lockers, I stopped, waiting for the emergency generator to come on. Every hotel, I told myself nervously, has one.
As I waited, I became aware that I was no longer alone in the room. I heard a foot scrape on the tiled floor, then something banged softly against metal. A janitor? An electrician? The manager?
“Hello?” I called out. “Who is it?”
I heard an indrawn breath not more than a few feet away. My heart jumped. I put out a hand, but couldn’t see it in the dark, nor did I touch anything. I took a step backward, and that’s when the arm came around me from behind.
I managed one scream, just before a hand clothed in a thick glove covered my mouth and nose. I couldn’t breathe, and I kicked backward, trying to strike a knee, a f
oot, a leg. But I was getting weak, and there were stars in my eyes…the kind that only come before blacking out.
I didn’t know the man who knelt beside me, holding a cool cloth on my forehead. I’d seen him, though. He was the other person in here this morning, the one working on the elliptical trainer.
It finally dawned on me that the reason I could see him was that the lights had come back on. Up close, he looked like one of those millionaire yuppies who’d made it big in their twenties. His dark hair was cut short and his muscles nicely tanned. In fact, this guy probably had muscles in places no one could see them. At the same time, he didn’t look like the many young, dumb and useless types in Hollywood. He was sweaty, and breathing hard.
“Don’t try to move,” he said. “You’ve got a huge lump on the back of your head.”
Oh, great. I finally meet a good-looking, non-Hollywood-type guy and here I am with a lump on my head. And not just a lump. A huge lump.
“What happened?” I asked, my lips barely moving.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I was out on the track. All of a sudden the lights when out and I heard you scream. I made my way over here and ran into something big—someone, actually. I felt him raise his arm, and I could see from the outside lights that he had something in his hand—a pipe, maybe. I tried to get it away from him, but before I could he’d hit you with it. Then he ran.”
I sat up, despite my rescuer’s protests. “He wanted me, then,” I said. “Not you.”
“Maybe. Do you know anyone who wants to hurt you?”
I thought of some of my ex-authors and tried to laugh. “Probably plenty of people have wanted to bash me on the head at some time or other.” The wet cloth had fallen into my lap, and I picked it up and held it to my aching head, remembering Tony, Arnold and Craig, and how they’d ended up. I’d been pretty damn lucky.